HulloMail Smart Voicemail is a neat program that every business user should have on their phone. I’ve written about it before, but it’s recently had new features added. To recap on the strengths of the core service: HulloMail takes voice messages left on your phone, converts them to MP3 files and delivers them to you by email. Additionally you can have a notification by text.

If you happen to be in an office or meeting room where mobile coverage is spotty but you have wi-fi, you won’t have to wait until you get out to know you’ve had messages.

You’ll get the notification immediately and can access the message through the app. What’s more, the voicemail messages are saved to the app indefinitely, not just the seven days that your phone network keeps them for before deleting.

It also has benefits if you’re abroad, allowing you to collect messages using wi-fi instead of expensively dialling home.

The new feature is Access Control which ensures you can detect and even prevent phone hacking. Not only does this mean you can block anyone dialling in to your voicemail to retrieve messages, it offers a notification when your messages are accessed so it’s easy to keep track of what’s going on.

Of course, we all hope that phone hacking, if not a thing of the past, won’t affect us, but if your messages include sensitive business information, it’s good to have an extra level of protection. You can set it so you can only access voicemails from within the app, or cut off internet access to the HulloMail emails and so on.

There are other useful business features, like the facility to record individual greeting messages for specific contacts – handy if you want certain business customers to hear something different from regular contacts.

HulloMail is available free, with ads on the screen, or for £5.99 a year with extended voicemail lengths, individual greetings and the new Access Control on iPhone and Android smartphones. It’s also available for BlackBerry phones with a lower subscription price of £4.99, though Access Control is not yet available on this platform.

It’s simple, reliable and full of pleasing features which make it an improvement over most other voicemail systems.